Director, National Science Foundation
The conference keynote speaker is National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Arden Bement, Jr. Bement became director of NSF in 2004 after previously leading the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Prior to his appointment as NIST director, Bement served as the David A. Ross Distinguished Professor of Nuclear Engineering and head of the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University. He has held appointments at Purdue University in the schools of Nuclear Engineering, Materials Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as a courtesy appointment in the Krannert School of Management. He was director of the Midwest Superconductivity Consortium and the Consortium for the Intelligent Management of the Electrical Power Grid.
Bement will speak at 9:15 a.m. on Tuesday, June 13.
Abstract
Global technological change is accelerating at an incredible pace. The need for deeper and broader collaborations among disciplines, researchers, sectors, and organizations is not just a nice idea—it's a matter of national survival. The ability to build, enhance, and maintain a world-class cyberinfrastructure is the cornerstone of continuing American competitiveness and prosperity. A fully functional TeraGrid represents the crucial "first wave" in a technological revolution that will change the manner and speed with which researchers from all fields of science accomplish their work. And it's just the beginning.
Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation
Dr. Atkins is Professor in the School of Information, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is now beginning a rotation as the first director of the new National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure. He was chair of the NSF Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel that authored the landmark 2003 report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure.
Atkins began his research career in the area of computer architecture and did pioneering work in high-speed computer arithmetic and parallel computer architecture. He has served as associate and interim dean of the College of Engineering and more recently as the founding dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Dr. Atkins does research and teaching in the socio-technical architecture of distributed knowledge communities. He has directed several large experimental digital library projects as well as projects to explore the design and application of "collaboratories" to scientific research. He is co-author of a recent book entitled Higher Education in the Digital Age: Technology Issues and Strategies for American Colleges and Universities. He serves as an international consultant to industry, foundations, educational institutions, and government.
A more complete bio is available.
Atkins will speak at 1:15pm on Tuesday, June 13.
Abstract
The U.S. National Science Foundation and numerous other research funding agencies around the world have begun initiatives to create, deploy, and apply a new generation of advanced cyberinfrastructure that holds promise to revolutionize the conduct of scientific and engineering research and allied education. Cyberinfrastructure includes supercomputers, data management systems, high capacity networks, digitally-enabled observatories and scientific instruments, and an interoperable suite of software and middleware services and tools for computation, visualization, and collaboration. The NSF has now developing and requesting community comment on an emerging Vision for 21st Century Discovery (PDF) based on cyberinfrastructure. It has created a new directorate-level Office of Cyberinfrastructure to help instantiate this vision across all of the NSF community. This talk will present background for these developments, share the vision as developed to date, and describe opportunities and challenges these developments offer to the future of research universities. Questions and discussion are welcome.
Director, Visualization and Experimental Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
Donna J. Cox is Director Visualization and Experimental Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She is Professor in the School of Art and Design and a recognized pioneer in computer art and scientific visualization. In 1986, Cox coined the term Renaissance Teams to describe interdisciplinary research groups who solve challenging visualization problems. These teams have worked to create new visual metaphors for disciplines as diverse as oceanography, atmospheric science, plastics engineering, and astrophysics. Cox was Art Director and Producer of Scientific Visualization, for the science educational IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage," nominated for 1997 Academy Award and funded by National Science Foundation, Smithsonian Institute, and the Motorola Foundation. She and her team have thrilled millions of people with visualizations for such programs as the PBS NOVA "Hunt for the Supertwister" and Hayden Planetarium's "Passport to the Universe" at the NYC American Museum of Natural History. She and her collaborative team recently completed the NSF funded "Black Holes: The Otherside of Infinity" that premiered at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in January 31, 2006. Her passion is to bring science to a wide range of audiences through innovative and aesthetic presentations of science. Cox has authored many book chapters and articles. Her latest is "Visualization and Visual Metaphors," in Aesthetic Computing, ed. Paul Fishwick, MIT Press, 2006. She is currently honored at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry as one of 40 selected modern-day Leonardo DaVinci's.
Cox will speak at 8:30am on Wednesday, June 14.
Abstract
Professor Donna J. Cox will present a visual feast of digital data-driven scientific imagery from her collaborative work with "Renaissance Teams" at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She coined the term "Renaissance Teams" in 1985 to describe interdisciplinary research teams focused on challenges in scientific visualization. In the early years, teams were small local groups, but now through grid technologies, most teams are distributed remotely and work collaboratively through global technologies. She collaborates, designs and artistically directs data-driven visualizations of supercomputer simulations from a variety of disciplines ranging from oceanography to astrophysics. She demonstrates both rigorous design methodologies and poetic solutions to the visualization of data. New visualization methods have resulted in advanced virtual reality tools that provide new ways for researchers to collaborate over remote distances and high-speed networks. Cox will describe these technologies to create high-resolution, high-fidelity digital scientific animations for museums and high-definition television.
Technology is exponentially transforming the way that people collaborate, scientists 'see', and designers invent. Cox will present a voyage of how art and science have converged through computer graphics technology. She explores the relationship between technology, visualization and metaphoric structure. Her greatest passion is to employ new technologies to provide outreach and science education to general audiences. This presentation will demonstrate advanced graphical techniques in the making of 'high art' science for insight and public presentation.
Associate Vice President for Research, University of Oklahoma
Kelvin K. Droegemeier earned a B.S. with Special Distinction in Meteorology in 1980 from the University of Oklahoma, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in atmospheric science in 1982 and 1985, respectively, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the direction of R. Wilhelmson. He joined the University of Oklahoma in September, 1985 as an Assistant Professor of Meteorology, and was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in July, 1991, and promoted to Professor in July, 1998. Dr. Droegemeier was co-founder in 1989 of the NSF Science and Technology Center (STC) for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS), and served for several years as its deputy director. He then became the director of CAPS in 1994. In 1998, Dr. Droegemeier was named a President's Associates Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma, and for 2 years, beginning in summer 1999, wrote a daily weather science column for the Daily Oklahoman newspaper, which is Oklahoma's largest. He was awarded a Regents' Professorship at OU in fall, 2001, which is a life-long title. In 2003, Dr. Droegemeier co-founded the NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) and currently serves as its deputy director. He is the only person in the nation to have co-founded an NSF Science and Technology Center and an NSF Engineering Research Center. In 2004, he was awarded the Roger and Sherry Teigen Presidential Professorship and became the first OU professor to receive two Presidential Professorships. In 2005, he was named the Weathernews Chair in Applied Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and also the Director of the Sasaki Institute, a non-profit organization that fosters the development and application of knowledge, policy, and advanced technology in the government, academic and private sectors. In 2004, Dr. Droegemeier was appointed by President George W. Bush to a 6-year term on the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation that also provides science policy guidance to the Congress and President. In 2005, Dr. Droegemeier was appointed Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Oklahoma.
Dr. Droegemeier will speak at 1:15pm on Wednesday, June 14.
Abstract
Those who have experienced the devastation of a tornado, the raging waters of a flash flood, or the paralyzing impacts of lake-effect snows understand that mesoscale weather develops rapidly, often with considerable uncertainty with regard to location. Such weather is also locally intense and frequently influenced by processes on both larger and smaller scales. Ironically, few of the technologies used to observe the atmosphere, predict its evolution, and compute, transmit, or store information about it operate in a manner that accommodates the dynamic behavior of mesoscale weather. Radars do not adaptively scan specific regions of thunderstorms; numerical models are run largely on fixed time schedules in fixed configurations; and cyberinfrastructure does not allow meteorological tools to run on-demand, change configurations in response to the weather, or provide the fault tolerance needed for rapid reconfiguration. As a result, today's weather technology is highly constrained and far from optimal when applied to any particular situation.
This presentation describes a major paradigm shift now underway in the field of meteorology—away from today's environment in which remote sensing systems, atmospheric prediction models, and hazardous weather detection systems operate in fixed configurations, and on fixed schedules largely independent of weather—to one in which they can change their configuration dynamically in response to the evolving weather. This transformation involves the creation of networked radars that collaborate with one another to dynamically adapt to the changing weather, optimally sensing multiple phenomena while simultaneously meeting multiple end user needs. It also involves Grid-enabled analysis and forecast systems that can operate on demand and dynamically reconfigure themselves, in response to the weather and end user needs. In addition to describing the research and technology development being performed to establish this capability, I discuss the associated economic and societal implications of dynamically adaptive weather sensing, analysis and prediction systems.
Director, NSF TeraGrid Project
Charlie Catlett is a Senior Fellow at Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory and Director of the NSF TeraGrid project, a $150M initiative involving a distributed "Grid" of information technologies at eight major supercomputing centers and universities. Prior to joining Argonne in 1999 Charlie was Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he had worked since 1985. From 1999 to 2004 Charlie directed the State of Illinois funded I-WIRE optical network project, deploying optical fiber infrastructure to interconnect ten locations in Illinois. From 1999 through 2004 he founded the Global Grid Forum, an international technical standards body with participants from over 40 countries. With Larry Smarr, Charlie co-authored the seminal paper "Metacomputing," in 1992 in the journal Communications of the ACM, which initiated what would become the concept of "Grid" computing. In 1996 he was a co-Investigator, along with Smarr as well as Rick Stevens, Dan Reed, and Ian Foster, of the $180M NCSA Alliance project, in which the term "Grid" was first coined. Charlie is a Computer Engineering graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Catlett will speak at 11:00am, Tuesday, June 13 and .
Abstract
The nation is making significant investments in advancing cyberinfrastructure to accelerate scientific discovery. TeraGrid Director, Charlie Catlett, will paint a vision for actively engaging larger and more diverse communities to both deepen and broaden the impact that cyberinfrastructure will have on scientific discovery within research and education.
Included in Catlett's remarks will be an overview of the scientific, technical, and educational accomplishments from the TeraGrid's first 18 months as a production facility. He will highlight the major national and international initiatives, partnerships, and future directions that are critical to achieving the vision.
Abstract
Charlie Catlett will lead a Town Hall meeting to engage conference participants in an open forum for the interchange of ideas. Participants will be asked to consider what they believe to be the most important thing TeraGrid can do to support research and education during the next year and beyond. We encourage everyone to join in this discussion to help shape a strong foundation for advancing scientific discovery.
The TeraGrid project is funded by the National Science Foundation and includes eight partners:
NCSA, SDSC, Argonne, PSC, ORNL, Purdue, Indiana, and TACC.
Please email the help@teragrid.org with questions or comments.
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